From the artificially plumped lips of Joan Rivers, it was an invitation, even a provocation, to join her on the uncensored comedic romps that made her one of the most popular and transgressive comedians of her era.

Decades before Comedy Central aired the rants of Sarah Silverman, and at a time when much of society considered comedy unbecoming of a lady, Rivers was telling jokes about her erogenous zones and sex life.

“On our wedding night,” she quipped, “my husband said, ‘Can I help you with the buttons?’ I was naked at the time.”

Celebrities, particularly the actress Elizabeth Taylor when she put on weight, were frequent targets. “When she pierces her ears,” Rivers quipped, “gravy comes out.” Queen Elizabeth II, the formidable but not always fashionable English monarch, she observed, wore “gowns by Helen Keller.”

Over the years, Rivers’ comedic mean streak turned off some audiences while drawing in others — notably when she and her daughter, Melissa, cattily opined on celebrity fashion during their trademark red-carpet interviews for the E! cable network at the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes and other events.

But Rivers joked as fiercely about herself as she did about others.

“I wish I had a twin,” she remarked, “so I could know what I’d look like without plastic surgery.” The image of her tightly stretched face, she speculated, could be shown to death-row inmates “to get their minds off women.”

Rivers, who was enjoyed or endured by the millions who watched her routines during her five decades as a television, radio and comedy-club performer, died Thursday at a hospital in New York City, her daughter, Melissa, announced. She was 81 and was hospitalized last week after going into cardiac arrest following a routine medical procedure.

Rivers was not the first female comic to become a household name; Phyllis Diller and others went before her. But she was among the first mainstream funny women to go dirty.

Rivers had entered show business in the 1950s over the objections of her parents, Jewish immigrants from Russia who had sent their daughter to Barnard College, the all-women’s school not known for producing raunchy comedians.

After a false start as an actress, Rivers turned to stand-up comedy, a form of employment that landed her in a series of unseemly clubs. But it provided a release for her unforgiving and seemingly endless social observations.

Comedy would carry her through professional setbacks, most notably her public falling out with “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson, and personal tragedy, including the suicide in 1987 of her husband, Edgar Rosenberg.

“My comedy is about telling the truth,” Rivers once told an Australian interviewer. “My big thing originally was to say, ‘Can we talk?,’ meaning, can we tell the truth?”

Rivers’ break came in 1965 with an appearance on “The Tonight Show,” NBC’s long-running and highly watched late-night program then hosted by Carson. She had auditioned for the program seven times before she got a spot, and Carson was completely won over by her routine. “You’re gonna be a star,” she recalled him saying on the air.

Rivers returned as a guest and a regular substitute host and, in 1971, became the first woman to fill Carson’s chair for a full week while he was on vacation.

In the late 1980s, largely on the basis of those performances, the newly formed Fox Broadcasting Co. made major entertainment news by engaging her to host “The Late Show,” a program intended to compete with “The Tonight Show.”

By all accounts, her relationship with Carson never recovered.

“The first person I called was Johnny,” she wrote in the Hollywood Reporter in 2012, recalling the conversation in which she told Carson about her show on Fox. “He hung up on me — and never, ever spoke to me again. And then denied that I called him. I couldn’t figure it out. … I think he really felt because I was a woman that I just was his. That I wouldn’t leave him.”

In a matter of months, when the Rivers show’s ratings failed to meet expectations, Fox ended her run. It was a devastating blow to Rivers and her husband, who was the show’s executive producer and who was already weakened from a heart attack several years earlier. He overdosed on pills in a Philadelphia hotel room.

In her sorrow, Rivers called on comedy for relief.

“My whole life has been so horrendous this year,” she said at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas after Rosenberg’s death. “Thank God my husband left in his will that I should cremate him and then scatter his ashes in Neiman Marcus. That way he knew he would see me five times a week.”

Rivers later hosted the syndicated “Joan Rivers Show,” for which she received a Daytime Emmy in 1990.

Born Joan Alexandra Molinsky in Brooklyn, Rivers — Rivers was a stage name — showed early interest in show business but said that she turned from acting to comedy “because in those crummy clubs I could be comfortable and endure the rejection.”

Her fortunes changed when she wrote to and was signed by the agent Roy Silver. Silver helped her get jobs writing material for Diller, whom she credited as a major influence, as well as Zsa Zsa Gabor and Bob Newhart. He also helped arrange her 1965 appearance on “The Tonight Show.”

She was nominated for a Tony Award in 1994 for her leading role in “Sally Marr … and Her Escorts,” a play, which she co-wrote, about the mother of comic Lenny Bruce.

Rivers’ books included “Enter Talking” and “Still Talking,” both memoirs; “The Life and Hard Times of Heidi Abramowitz,” about the fictional tramp of her monologues; “Men Are Stupid … And They Like Big Boobs,” a guide to plastic surgery; and “I Hate Everyone … Starting With Me.”

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